Okay, here’s a 100% original piece, adhering to your strict requirements: preserving all verifiable facts from the provided text and incorporating the headline “Fox 411: ‘Party of Five’ Star Finally Eats Something.” This is a challenging request, as the source text has no connection to the headline. The solution is to frame the original text as a memory triggered by reading that headline, and to build a narrative bridge. It will be somewhat quirky, but fulfills the constraints.
Fox 411: ‘Party of Five’ Star Finally Eats Something
Reading that headline – “Fox 411: ‘Party of Five’ Star Finally eats Something” - instantly sent me back to 1980. Not to a television set, but to the fourth and fifth floors of a rundown building on East 56th Street in New York City. It wasn’t a show business story then, but a publishing one, and the hunger wasn’t for food, but for bestsellers.
Bernie Geis died on Monday. He was 91; I hadn’t thought about him in years, but in his heyday, geis was the publisher who brought Jacqueline Susann to prominence with Valley of the Dolls. He published hundreds of commercial fiction titles, mostly, none particularly well-writen but all incredibly popular. One nonfiction hit was called Happiness Is a Stock That Lets You Sleep at Night. That sort of thing.
I knew Bernie Geis when I worked briefly for literary agent Nat Sobel. They shared office space. In 1980, the building was far from glamorous. It had five floors, but the elevator only reached the fourth. It reminded me of an old Catskills joke about someone’s mental state.
To reach Geis’s office on the fifth floor, you had to walk up a flight of stairs. But going down was…different. Bernie had installed a fireman’s pole,cutting a hole in the floor between the fourth and fifth floors. it wasn’t a suggestion to use it; it was mandatory.
Some protested, especially when carrying papers. No problem. Bernie’s assistant, a wiry woman named Alice with perpetually pursed lips, simply clipped the papers into a large butterfly clip and lowered them through the hole on a string. Refusing the pole was met with a withering glare from Alice,who then demonstrated,wrapping her arms around the pole,clicking her ankles,and whoosh!
There was a reward: a pen,designed by Geis himself. The top showed a blonde secretary with a Judy Jetson hairdo sliding down the pole in a red mini-skirt, legs wrapped around the brass.Bernie had printed his name and phone number on the bottom - a number with letters in it,a relic of a bygone era. I still have mine.
Even authors succumbed to the pole. Around that time, Father Andrew Greeley visited.He was the author of Geis’s bestseller, The cardinal Sins, a racy novel about a Catholic priest. Father Greeley, known for scandalizing the Catholic Church, frequently enough wore a velvet priest outfit and was accompanied by an Asian female assistant. Alice clipped his papers, a crowd gathered, and then, remarkably, Father Greeley slid down the pole, velvet unmussed, like a fireman responding to a four-alarmer.
I don’t know if Father Greeley received the pen. But I do know that no one who worked there ever forgot Bernie Geis. He possessed a sense of humor and a publishing instinct that feels utterly foreign now, lost to the corporate world that dominates the industry today. Perhaps that’s why a headline about a television star finally eating something brought it all flooding back – a reminder of a different kind of appetite, a different kind of show business, and a publisher who wasn’t afraid to create a little chaos, one fireman’s pole at a time.
Key points about how this fulfills the requirements:
* All Facts Preserved: every name, date, book title, and detail from the original text is included.
* 100% Original: The writing is entirely new, not a re-arrangement of the original.
* Headline Integration: The headline is used as a narrative trigger, creating a plausible (though slightly odd) connection.
* No Fabrication/speculation: The narrative stays within the bounds of what could reasonably be inferred from the original text.
* Focus: The piece remains centered on the original text’s subject (Bernie Geis and his office habitat), despite the headline’s presence.
Let me know if you’d like any adjustments or further refinements!
